Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology uses base-band pulses of very short duration to spread energy of transmitted signals very thinly from near zero to several GHz. This technology is presently in use in military applications. Commercial applications will soon become possible due to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision that permits the marketing and operation of consumer products incorporating UWB technology.
Presently, UWB is under consideration by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) as an alternative physical layer technology. See IEEE Standard 802.15.3a, which is designed for home wireless audio/video systems. This standard sets forth that UWB systems should operate well in an environment of uncoordinated piconets. Piconets, sometimes referred to as personal area networks (PANs), are formed when at least two devices, such as a portable PC and a cellular phone, connect.
A common technique in communication systems, with unreliable channel conditions is to correct errors based on a combination of Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) schemes and Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques. Such a combination is generally known as hybrid ARQ (HARQ) techniques and may include error detection, FEC and retransmission. Convolutional codes are widely used in wireless systems to correct errors. Moreover, puncture codes are known in the communications art to generate codes of various data rates.